Dutoit's steady hand keeps Russian epic in check

March 06, 2010|By John von Rhein | Classical music critic

Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 11 ("The Year 1905") is a programmatic symphony evoking a massacre of unarmed workers by soldiers in czarist St. Petersburg in that year, a key event in modern Russian history. It has always divided the composer's admirers. Is it an artifact of socialist realism designed to suck up to the Soviet cultural apparatchiks? A coded indictment of Stalinist tyranny? A film score without the film? Or is it something deeper and more complex?

I'm not convinced that guest conductor Charles Dutoit set out to argue any single point of view in his gripping performance of the hourlong work with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Thursday night at Orchestra Hall. He seemed to be telling the audience, in effect, that amid the flaws and fustian this sprawling symphonic epic contains some of Shostakovich's most powerful music, and here it is: You decide what it's really about.

Not for Dutoit the almost unbearable emotional identification and intensity the composer's friend and colleague Mstislav Rostropovich brought to the 11th Symphony during the CSO's Shostakovich Festival in 1999. But many roads lead to Rome, and Dutoit's steady, organizing hand was just the thing to keep this sometimes blatant and unruly music from going off the track.

His control of dynamics, tempo and structure was impressive from the start, where the music's frozen stillness carried an eerie expectancy. The abrupt leaps from the ferocious battle music of the second movement ("The Ninth of January") to the numbed quiet of the third ("Eternal Memory") were carefully controlled so that the music built and released tension organically, with no loss of momentum.

Too bad the rudely cough-happy crowd didn't reserve its hacking for the tumultuous finale ("The Alarm"), where it wouldn't have disrupted a thing.

The score is made to order for the CSO's pumped corporate musculature. The brass and percussion players dug into their parts for maximum sonic impact, and the deep tolling of a big Russian church bell really did sound like a tocsin. Scott Hostetler's English horn sang a poignant lament to quiet all the sound and fury that had preceded it.

There was more Russian music to begin the concert — Rachmaninov's ever-popular Second Piano Concerto, in a wonderfully impassioned performance by Kirill Gerstein, making his CSO subscription series debut.

One could tell just from the finely graded series of chords with which the work begins why the young Russian virtuoso won the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award for 2010. Gerstein handled them like a master, and they launched a reading of rhapsodic intensity and big-hearted Russian lyricism. He wowed the audience not by indulging in cheap tricks or self-regarding sensationalism but by treating this music seriously, like the splendid romantic masterpiece it is.

The outer movements were a feast of powerful chords, whirling runs and scintillating passage work that generated palpable excitement in the house. Even more impressive was the sensitivity with which the pianist spun the cantabile of the slow movement, applying plenty of rubato but always with a firm line to support it, in close dialogue with solo instruments like Gregory Smith's supple clarinet. The orchestral support was just as caring throughout, not least the dark-chocolate coloration supplied by principal oboe Eugene Izotov.

Symphony Center Presents schedule

The CSO has released its Symphony Center Presents concert schedule for the 2010-11 season.

Orchestras visiting Orchestra Hall next season are the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev; the Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welser-Most conducting; Yuri Temirkanov with his St. Petersburg Philharmonic; and the Orchestre National de France under Daniel Gatti.

Chamber music concerts will be given by the duo of violinist Pinchas Zukerman and pianist Yefim Bronfman, and the trio of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax and clarinetist Anthony McGill. Baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky will perform a Russian song recital. Violist Yuri Bashmet and pianist Evgeny Kissin will team up for another duo recital, and a vocal quartet led by baritone Thomas Quasthoff will perform Brahms and Schumann.